Carolyn Kaster/AP

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin oulines the Trump administration's tax-reform plans at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, April 26, 2017.

Do big budget deficits matter anymore?

That’s a big question lurking beneath the surface as President Trump’s new tax-cut proposals are rolling into public view.

Mr. Trump’s election campaign included both pitches for tax cuts and pledges to tame federal debt. As he has settled into the White House, however, the talk has increasingly shifted toward tax cuts and away from tax reform that holds revenues steady (as would be needed to make tax changes permanent by a majority vote in Congress). 

It’s not yet a detailed plan, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin set goals and principles Wednesday that include slashing corporate tax rates from 35 percent of profits to 15 percent, and cutting individual taxes as well.

This isn’t just a pivot for the Trump team. Many fiscal-policy experts say it rests within a larger pattern: Politicians, and to some extent the economists who advise them, aren’t as focused as they used to be on restraining government debt and deficits.

That doesn’t mean Secretary Mnuchin paid no lip service to the goal of fiscal discipline, or that Congress will ignore that value in its deliberations. But at a time when polls suggest the public still sees deficits as an important problem, lawmakers face a test of whether they’ll put the goal of short-term fiscal stimulus ahead of long-term fiscal discipline.

“The economy is doing reasonably well,” says Roberton Williams, an expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. America got a boost from spending “like crazy when the economy was bad,” he says, but in recent times “we've never quite figured out that second step” of getting back on a balanced track during good times.

“We don’t fill back up that rainy day fund,” he says, drawing a metaphor from reserves that many states have created as cushions against recession. “States are much better at that.”

It may be a false sense of security. Although federal deficits surged during and after the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, they have actually fallen sharply since then and are now near their five-decade average as a share of the US economy.

But even without tax cuts, that annual gap between revenue and spending appears poised to rise again – and to drive a parallel surge in public debt from this decade into the future, as obligations for both health-care entitlements and interest on the debt soar.

A key shift

It’s not that politicians aren’t aware of the problem. And some are actively seeking to address it.

But fiscal discipline isn’t viewed as an imperative the way it once more generally was.

Bill White, a former Houston mayor who researched and wrote a book on America’s fiscal history, says a key shift happened in the early 2000s under George W. Bush. President Bush pushed for big tax cuts in 2003 even though the nation was at war, the economy wasn’t in recession, and nonpartisan forecasts showed widening deficits as a result.

Republican strategists had taken note: Bush’s father had been voted out of the White House in 1992 after raising taxes despite a “no new taxes” pledge.

And Mr. White says Democrats have shared the blame of Washington’s shifting fiscal mores. One bipartisan move under Bush was the funding of a new entitlement – prescription-drug benefits under Medicare – without paying for it.

It’s not just politics behind the shift, either. In the wake of the Great Recession, liberal economists have argued the case that fiscal stimulus (jargon for federal spending or tax cuts that can give a short-term boost to the economy) may be justifiable in some nonrecession times. (But for the record: Those economists generally are skeptical that Trump’s tax cuts would raise growth meaningfully.)

A streak of prudence

All this is different from the past, says White.

“The fiscal tradition [of America] recognized the link between decisions on spending and decisions on taxes,” he says.

Conservatives believed that having a visible price tag (taxes) would help put a check on public spending, while progressives saw the need for sustainable funding for a social safety net.

And if Americans aren’t fans of tax hikes, some polls suggest the public has a streak of fiscal prudence that has held pretty steady.

Looking at government, they’ve strongly supported the idea of balanced budgets in polls spanning from 1940 to the early 2000s, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. And in their personal lives, Americans increasingly see saving money as preferable to spending (at least as an ideal), Gallup surveys find.

Although economists often aren’t fans of strict budgetary balance, they agree on the dangers that too much debt can bring – potentially higher interest rates or a financial panic over default risks.

At the same time, many economists and ordinary Americans say the time is ripe for simplifying the tax system and seeking to make it promote greater economic growth and fairness.

Trump's tax cuts

Those goals took center stage as Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, announced Trump’s proposals Wednesday.

“Making the economy work better for all the American people” is the president’s goal, Mr. Cohn said at a White House briefing.

The proposal includes paring the number of individual tax brackets to just three, giving businesses a “massive” tax cut, and eliminating the estate tax.

Voters rarely complain about a cut in their taxes. In April Gallup polling, 51 percent of respondents called their taxes “too high.” Yet people aren’t necessarily crying out for tax cuts: Some 61 percent in the same poll call what they owe “fair.” And two-thirds say businesses pay too little in taxes, not too much.

US stock prices were trading at or near record highs Wednesday afternoon as details of the Trump proposal for business taxes were coming into focus.

Regarding impacts on the budget deficit, Mnuchin said, “we are working with the House and Senate on all the details” to get the legislation passed. In recent days he has also suggested that economic growth would allow a tax cut to pay for itself – a notion disputed by economists.

Republicans in Congress range from some focused on reining in deficits (notably House Speaker Paul Ryan) to others more open to tax cuts that aren’t paid for with reductions in spending.

​The legislative outlook is uncertain, but longer term White says he's hopeful that forces of fiscal restraint – which he thinks have served the nation well in the past – can revive.

“I think there could be a backlash among small-government conservatives to the Trump programs," he says. "And I think that many people who are Democrats understand that rising interest costs ... are crowding out the possibility for investing more" in things like education and infrastructure.

Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum

Unbroken mastodon ribs and vertebrae, including one vertebra with a large well preserved neural spine, found in excavation unit J4.

American history may have begun more than 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.

At least that's what a team of scientists suggest in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The paper's authors point to an assemblage of broken mastodon bones and chipped rocks unearthed in southern California as evidence that a stone tool-wielding people snacked on the meat and marrow, or perhaps shaped tools out of the massive animal's skeleton, when it died some 130,000 years ago.

Such a megafauna-human interaction from that period wouldn't have been shocking to find almost anywhere else in the world, as various archaic human species had already spread across much of the globe. But humans are thought to have first settled the Americas around 15,000 years ago, give or take a thousand years, not 100,000.

Rewriting history is not an easy thing to do. The researchers' findings have been met with widespread skepticism, highlighting just how hard it is to reframe historical narratives.

"It's an extraordinary claim. It would rewrite the prehistory of the Americas, and the prehistory of human migrations around the world," says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. Still, he says, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I didn't find it here."

But Thomas Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum and one of the paper's authors, disagrees. "Of course extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence and we feel that [this site] preserves such evidence," he said in a press conference.

Skeptics largely suggest that the evidence for a hominin presence could too easily be explained away. For example, the authors point to spiral fractures in the bones as being key evidence of a hominin smashing the bones with hammerstones, which matches behavior thought to be associated with prehistoric humans in Africa at the time, and even tried smashing elephant bones themselves as a proxy. But Joseph Ferraro, an anthropologist at Baylor University who studies archaeological and paleontological materials across humanity’s history in East Africa, suggests that there may be another explanation.

The research team ruled out another carnivore chewing or bashing the bones, but Dr. Ferraro says that proboscideans, a group that includes elephants, mammoths, mastodons, and other tusked megafauna, are known to have tussled, using their tusks and whacking each other's flanks. "It's not uncommon to get broken ribs, not uncommon to get broken legs, and so forth," he says. "That could easily result in a fracture, and if it results in the death of an individual, there's not going to be any signs of any healing," much like the breaks found on the mastodon that is the focus of this study.

"You can spin so many different equally or more plausible stories about how and why this assemblage formed, without having to invoke any sort of hominin activity whatsoever," Ferraro says.

So just what would it take for this discovery to revise the prehistory of the Americas?

Although cutmarks and flaked stone tools would make this site more compelling, Ferraro says, all that is really needed would be one human fossil. If you had an unquestionably well-dated Homo erectus, or Neanderthal, or Denisovan, or even Homo sapiens bone, he says, then the prehistory books would certainly need to be rewritten. But, he says, "This is not that."

The prehistory of the Americas has actually been rewritten before. For decades, archaeologists thought they knew exactly how and when humans first spread across the Americas.

The story, called the Clovis-first model, had the Clovis people as the first population to spread south into the Americas from the region near the Bering land bridge when an ice-free corridor opened up through the middle of Canada, around 13,500 years ago at the earliest. As this model reigned, older archaeological sites, like an underwater 14,500-year-old site in Florida or a 15,000-year-old site in Chile, were dismissed as insufficient evidence. The thinking was that anything dating before the distinctive Clovis spearpoints showed up in the archaeological record couldn't possibly be evidence of a human presence.

But as fresh evidence poured in from sites across the Americas, including genetic analysis, the Clovis-first model was eventually discarded and the history books were rewritten.

Tom Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, helped lead efforts countering the Clovis-first narrative through his work at the Monte Verde archaeological site in Chile. But, he says, although the San Diego site is a "classic early site" made up of bones and stones, the Monte Verde site also had other evidence pointing to a human presence, such as burned wood, knotted reeds, chunks of hide and meat, and even footprints.

Dr. Dillehay advises that it's best to try to disprove any potentially history-shattering claims, rather than trying to prove them, saying it's a stronger way to rule out all the other possible explanations for the evidence.

In the case of debunking the Clovis-first model, more archaeological sites bolstered the claim, and the same could help support Deméré and his colleagues' claim, too.

There have been previous suggestions of such shockingly early human occupation of the Americas, similar to the current claim, Dr. Erlandson says. Items suggested to be artifacts of particularly ancient human settlements have been described from other sites in southern California, for example. But when this was proposed before, scientists went out looking for more evidence, Erlandson says, "And they never came up with anything convincing."

Erlandson himself looked for evidence of human-caused fire, but was unable to find evidence that old scorched materials were the result of anything other than wildfires.

Still, Steven Holen, lead author on the new paper, said in the press conference that he has already been looking for similar fractures in megafauna bones, which may have been overlooked by paleontologists who wouldn't have even considered a human impact at the time. Dr. Holen says evidence may have fallen through the cracks between archaeology and paleontology, as archaeologists wouldn't have been looking at materials this old before and paleontologists wouldn't have been considering a human factor when they examined the bones.

But Ferraro says such an assertion isn't giving the experts enough credit. "There's a big literature out there on bone damage," he says. Paleontologists who devote their lives to studying bone damage can even identify something as specific as which species of termite once munched an old bone, he says, so he suspects paleontologists wouldn't have missed something as significant as evidence of human activity.

Skeptics are also concerned about the bigger-picture implications of shifting the story of human occupation in the Americas so dramatically.

"As scientists we're supposed to keep an open mind, but this discovery is hard to wrap my mind around because it falls so far beyond the realm of accepted knowledge," Erlandson says. "I'm not opposed to controversial theories," he says, "but if it's really 130,000 years ago, it just raises so many questions": for example, who those people were, where they came from, how they got there, and what happened in the subsequent 100,000 years.

To answer that last question, the authors did suggest in the press conference that, like any other population of animals, this group of humans may have died out and therefore not left a trace in the years before the ancestors of today's Native Americans trekked across the land bridge from Siberia and spread across the region.

Filling in the other gaps of the background story implied by Deméré, Holen, and colleagues' claim would require other extraordinary claims, Ferraro says. To explain how humans got to southern California would require a scenario such as one in which Homo erectus, Denisovans, or another archaic human species would have had to have been making boats in Siberia and following the coastline east, then down the western coast of the Americas, for example.

And each detail needed to support such a tale, from whether they possessed boating technology to which archaic human species made the journey, would be an additional extraordinary claim in its own right, he says, which would in turn require its own set of extraordinary evidence.

"It just requires so many individual extraordinary claims," Ferraro says. "It's not just one claim, but the whole argument is resting on a very shaky foundation."

Perhaps eventually the prehistory books of the Americas will need to be revised to include a human presence 130,000 years ago, but first, Dillehay says, all other possible explanations need to be ruled out. "In other words," he says, the question must be asked: "Are we being fooled in this case once again?"

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

A woman walks past official posters of 2017 French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen of the National Front (l.) and Emmanuel Macron, head of the political movement En Marche!, (r.) at a local market in Bethune, France, on Monday.

France has a well-earned reputation for being quick to protest over everything from labor laws to Uber to increasing the age of retirement.

But that's not how Quentin Legouy and Jeremy Camilleri, supporters of presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron, see their country.

The pair are convinced that Mr. Macron, who will face Marine Le Pen in France’s May 7 presidential runoff, and his “En Marche” movement will shine a light on a different side of France: a side that pounds the pavement to found startups and seeks a revival in politics.

“This is the new France, and we spoke,” says Mr. Camilleri, a young engineer, moments after Macron addressed his jubilant base after winning the first round of voting Sunday.

The presidential candidate – at turns compared to former US President Barack Obama and his message of hope, to Tony Blair’s centrist New Labour movement, and even the youthful military leader Napoleon Bonaparte – has inspired a social movement that is convinced that spanning the political spectrum is the best hope for France.

The youthful former investment banker who claims to be neither right nor left also evokes deep skepticism, seen in some of his election posters in Paris this week that were defaced with the words “ultrabanker.” But his supporters say if he delivers on his promises, he can reform France and help restore confidence to the country and the European project.

Pierre Boisard, a sociologist of work and social cohesion at ENS Cachan University, says that the French seek reform, but their leaders have failed to light the path to it. “Everyone wants change, but they are afraid,” he says. “The point with Macron is that he’s pragmatic, he’s not going to say he wants a grand reform that changes everything. He proposes changes that don’t scare people.”

Perceptions

There was reason to expect any number of outcomes in the first round. On the one hand, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and then America's choice of Donald Trump as president pointed at a populist revolt. On the other, Austria elected a pro-European president in December, and right-wing populist Geert Wilders underperformed expectations in the Netherlands in March.

Ultimately, Macron came out over two points ahead of Ms. Le Pen, soothing pro-EU Europeans beyond France, many of whom mingled at Macron’s election event Sunday. And he currently enjoys a 20-point lead over Le Pen ahead of round two.

Charles O’Donnell, an Irish economist getting his PhD in Paris, says Macron's success so far "is a reminder not to panic, that we’re still very much together as a European society, to give us some confidence that things are going to be OK.” But he warns it’s not over – Macron has neither won nor proven he can do what he says he would do.

He needs to win over a country divided by class and geography. And in an era when Euroskepticism has reigned, even turning many a pro-EU leader Euro-reticent, Macron has come out in unfettered defense of the bloc and its future.

Although the election results pushed out of the runoff both mainstream center-right and -left parties for the first time in the Fifth Republic, Le Pen has tried to paint Macron as a political elitist disguised as a revolution. An “En Marche” post-results celebration featuring writers and celebrities at a classy bistro on Sunday night did nothing to dispel the perceptions of elitism and arrogance.

Since Sunday, Macron has been congratulated across European capitals. Earlier this month he received a phone call from Mr. Obama. Macron has received the backing of the mainstream players, including French President François Hollande.

For foes, it feeds into the idea that he’s just “Hollande-bis”: an encore of the current president and a continuation of the status quo.

A finder of consensus?

Macron is said to be inspired by an Anglo-Saxon spirit, putting particular emphasis on entrepreneurism. A fluent English speaker, he says French people “should revel in success.” At a campaign stop in Toulon earlier this year, he said France has “become a country that is afraid to dare.”

Yet he seeks this for France within the protection of the welfare state the way Nordic countries have organized their economies.

His platform has been called vague, and its left-right nature is unfamiliar – and risky – in a French context. Édouard Lecerf, global director of political opinion and research at Kantar Public in Paris, has compared him to the egg required in the emulsification of vinegar and oil to make mayonnaise.

“He’s aggregating things that come from the left and right,” Mr. Lecerf said at a meeting with the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris ahead of the first round. “You have to keep whipping for it to take shape…. If you put a little too much of one or the other at one time, it will start to turn.”

Among his proposals, he wants more welfare for the worst off, but wants to reduce public spending, getting the budget deficit to under 3 percent as the EU requires. He says he can get unemployment down to 7 percent from its current 10 percent. He wants to shed 120,000 state jobs, reduce the size of government, and make France’s famously rigid labor market more flexible.

Mr. Boisard says he believes Macron is better poised to carry out reform than his predecessors, who faced crippling protests that left economic structures largely unmoved. “He’s pragmatic,” Boisard says.

Instead of saying he’ll overhaul the labor system, for example, Macron proposes to extend unemployment benefits for workers who choose to leave their jobs. Many stay in them unhappily and unproductively for fear they’ll have nothing if they leave.

And Mr. Legouy, the “En Marche” volunteer, says by adopting policies on the right and left, Macron could introduce to France the kind of consensus that is a hallmark of the “grand coalitions” that have become common, for example, in Germany.

“Maybe it’s the best way to get the best of France,” he says. “I think French people are bored by left, right, left, right. We have to do what is best for France.”

Favorite by default

Formidable challenges lie ahead for him.

Despite the optimism of his Sunday night victory gathering – filled with young people, many of them exceedingly well-dressed – he didn’t get the most votes among young people ages 18 to 24. That age bracket went first to Mr. Mélenchon, followed by Le Pen. And the race revealed a streak of defiance in the French electorate, with over 40 percent of votes going to both the far-right and far-left.

Much of Macron’s rise has come down to luck – the woes of the ruling classes and in particular the corruption charges that engulfed center-right candidate François Fillon, who was once the clear frontrunner.

Thomas Guénolé, a professor of politics at Sciences Po in Paris, says Macron is rallying “happy France,” which could ultimately leave the country more divided.

“Macron is a champion of the part of the French population that doesn’t have serious problems in life,” Mr. Guénolé says.

If he wins and attempts his reform package, it could lead to even more digging in of heels – and some fear could even pave the way to a future Le Pen victory. Implicit in the personal comparisons to Mr. Blair and Mr. Obama is the reality of both Britain and the US today: the Labour Party is in shambles as Britain prepares to leave the EU, while Mr. Trump followed Obama into the White House.

Roland Freudenstein, director of policy at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels, says that he hopes the “newcomer aura” that currently surrounds Macron will, if he’s elected, open space and confidence for the structural reforms that France needs, and that the EU needs of France. He says there is still a huge gap between the optimism of his movement and the hard choices implicit in reforming a country.

But he also says he believes that Macron, if adept at crossing political lines, is the best hope for a “once-in-a-half century chance to actually seriously reform France.”

Ben Margot/AP

A leaflet is seen stapled to a message board near Sproul Hall on the University of California at Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on April 21, 2017. The University of California, Berkeley, says it's preparing for possible violence on campus whether Ann Coulter comes to speak or not.

What started as a debate over conservative pundit Ann Coulter's scheduled talk at the University of California, Berkeley, has become a nationwide showdown over freedom of expression, with a lawsuit filed and riots in the offing.

Ms. Coulter’s brand of polemic conservatism – often associated with white nationalism and the “alt-right” movement – has come up against left-wing elements who refuse to tolerate such ideas.

“We don’t accept the right of immigrant-basher bigots to come to Berkeley and help propel Trump’s deportation machine to make it more hostile for human beings who are here,” says Hoku Jeffrey, a Berkeley graduate and representative of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a left-wing group that participated in previous protests that grew violent. “There is nothing that makes that OK.”

In insisting Coulter be allowed to speak, conservatives are asserting the right to speak freely. In protesting her presence, groups like BAMN are wielding the right to assembly.

“You have these two groups that are ideologically opposed to each other that are both trying to express their First Amendment rights,” says Lata Nott, executive director of the First Amendment Center at the Newseum Institute in Washington. “People need to be reminded that free speech rights are indivisible. When you try to silence one group, the precedent you’re setting will be used against you.”

The furor first caused UC Berkeley to cancel Coulter's April 27 visit. The university then reversed its decision and offered to reschedule. But the Berkeley College Republicans and the Young America's Foundation, which had invited her, filed a lawsuit saying the university infringed their constitutional rights. Through it all, Coulter vowed to proceed on April 27 as planned – until Wednesday, when she canceled, saying the groups had withdrawn their support.

The conflict threatened to once more turn violent, as it did earlier this month when anarchists and right-wing agitators clashed near campus in a bloody melee. In February, riots broke out when masked protesters tried to stop alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the university.

Pundits have noted the irony that the university that birthed the free-speech movement of the 1960s is now the venue for such a showdown. But in a way, that's the point. The uproar over Coulter's appearance underscores a shift in thought about freedom of expression – particularly on college campuses, which have become more dominated by liberal ideas in the past 25 years.

“Berkeley should be the epicenter of the marketplace of ideas,” writes First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza for CNN. "Unfortunately, it has become the most intolerant place in America.”

'A dangerous equivalency'

Through the fall of 1964, UC Berkeley was ground zero for student protests against a ban on political activity on campus – particularly causes related to the Civil Rights Movement. The sit-ins and demonstrations were largely peaceful, and led to the now-celebrated student activism that swept the nation throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

Today, Berkeley is not alone in protesting the presence of right-wing speakers. In July 2016, more than 300 students at Elon University in North Carolina petitioned against an appearance by Kathleen Parker, whose book, “Save the Males,” contends that feminism has made enemies of men. White nationalist Richard Spencer drew hundreds of protesters when he spoke at Texas A&M University in December.

Similar demonstrations have taken place at California State University, Los Angeles; Middlebury College in Vermont; and New York University.

Part of the issue, analysts say, is that universities are increasingly situated on one side of America's widening political gap.

In 2014, 60 percent of professors at higher education institutions identified themselves as “liberal” or “far-left,” compared with 42 percent in 1990. While that doesn’t mean colleges have become “indoctrination mills” for liberalism, critics say it has contributed to an environment where conservative thought is often dismissed as laughable – or outright evil.

“It’s like someone is claiming the Earth is flat or something,” says James Miller, a conservative professor of economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

The implication is that liberal ideas are more deserving of First Amendment protections than conservative ones, says constitutional lawyer Brian Levin. But all speech – regardless of content – has intrinsic value, he adds. 

“It's about allowing unfettered access to viewpoints,” says Professor Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Recent face-offs also give rise to a troubling view of free speech as something to be wielded by one faction against another.

“There’s a willingness to see speech as a kind of harm in and of itself. [People] feel attacked by these speakers,” adds Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonpartisan group in Philadelphia that aims to protect and sustain constitutional rights at educational institutions.

“If you are willing to cede speech as a form of violence, it makes a certain amount of sense to respond with physical violence,” he adds. “That’s setting up a dangerous equivalency.”

New civil rights movement on campuses

To those protesting campus appearances of conservative figures, focusing on free speech is missing the point.

“The right-wing people ... don’t have any lack of ways to publicly air their thoughts,” says Mr. Jeffrey of BAMN, whose goals include defending immigrant rights and affirmative action. “That’s not a real issue. Having real racial integration and inclusion, that’s a diversity of thought.”

The argument echoes the assertion at the heart of the new civil rights movement at college campuses. Across the country, minority students and their supporters have lobbied for inclusion that goes beyond token diversity, popularizing terms such as “safe spaces” and “microaggressions."

“They’re looking for that sense of belonging,” says Ajuan Mance, professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

Eric McDaniel, a political scientist and organizational behavior expert at the University of Texas at Austin, says that while violence is not desirable, it can be necessary to get the public's attention.

“Sometimes it's an issue of desperation,” says Professor McDaniel. “You have to ask why people would want to tear down the system.”

History lessons

With tensions running high at Berkeley, cooler heads counsel taking the long view – and learning lessons from the past.

“There are times when we look back and realize we overreacted or this person had something important to say but was ignored,” Professor McDaniel says.

Even the free-speech protests of 1964 weren’t always regarded with pride. Lynne Hollander Savio, a former activist and widow of Berkeley protest leader Mario Savio, says the public so disapproved of their rallies that Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 partly on the promise of restoring law and order to the university.

“When we first came on the scene, they hated us,” says Ms. Hollander Savio, who was a senior when the sit-ins took place and still lives near Berkeley.

“[They said] we were communist beatniks, ungrateful, that we ought to be sent out to work,” she recalls. Now, she says, “they say we had brought free speech to the university.”

For the past five years, Jim and Kate Henderson have been on a personal odyssey. The summer before second grade, their daughter said she felt like a boy and wanted to be treated like one, too.

“I realized [then] as a parent that, even if I’m struggling understanding this for myself, I have no more important job in my existence than to ensure my kid feels they’re loved and affirmed for who they are,” says Mr. Henderson.

So began a slow, sometimes awkward and occasionally painful process of self-education and protection. Conferences were attended, friends and family were notified, teachers consulted – all with the goal of ensuring their child felt safe and secure.

Now with their son in sixth grade, the Missouri family, who requested that their names be changed to protect their child, say they believed they had built a strong network of support around themselves. Their son, they felt, had been given a chance for a normal childhood.

But recently they have been pitched into uncertainty, they say, first by the unexpected election of Donald Trump, then by the US Supreme Court declining to hear a major transgender case this spring, and finally by their state legislature contemplating a controversial "bathroom bill."

“It’s hard to have parent control around that,” says Ms. Henderson. “That’s a much longer, harder journey than taking care of our one precious kid in our little beautiful family.”

“I was hoping we would find some peace and people would move forward,” she adds. “We’re now in the most vulnerable position we’ve been in.”

Multiple parents of transgender students, and the teens themselves, say 2017 has brought greater uncertainty than any they've faced in recent years. That it comes after a period of what seemed like growing understanding for trans Americans leaves them feeling particularly unsure of what the future may hold.

Debate around transgender issues, particularly access to public bathrooms, has been bubbling for years, occasionally coming to a boil over specific legislation or litigation. But overall, the transgender community and advocates felt that progress was being made. Eighteen states and hundreds of cities and counties have laws in effect barring discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and transgender celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have made transgenderism headline news in recent years.

But recent events have bred the fear that progress could be stifled, or worse, reversed.

'It's almost like starting from scratch'

Across the border in Illinois, state laws are much friendlier to the transgender community – including gender nondiscrimination and antibullying laws. But Chris Meyers, a bespectacled transgender senior who hopes to become a therapist, is barred from using the boy’s bathroom at high school, something he says makes him feel “like I’m being labeled” and “like they’re trying to separate me.”

And recent national developments have his mother, Liz, in a pessimistic mood.

“It’s almost like starting from scratch,” she says. “It’s like you get so far, and all of a sudden you’re knocked down a notch.”

In February, the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era Department of Education guidance allowing transgender students in public schools to use the bathroom corresponding with their gender identity (a guidance that underpinned high-schooler Gavin Grimm’s earlier victory in federal appeals court). The Texas Senate passed a bill last month that would restrict bathroom access based on “biological sex,” and 16 states have introduced similar legislation this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. North Carolina partially repealed its controversial bathroom bill in a compromise deal that left people on both sides of the issue upset.

Much remains unclear, including the Trump administration’s positions on specific transgender rights and the fate of many of those state-level bills. Nevertheless, many transgender advocates fear that after more than a decade of progress – not only around the legal and social issues facing the trans community, but also awareness of its very existence – those gains could begin to be eroded.

Mason Dunn became an activist 13 years ago when he says not many people were even familiar with the word “transgender.” As a transgender male, he would get kicked out of department stores and verbally harassed on the street. But in recent years, he says, “the climate changed in very large and important ways.”

Not only are there more laws and policies supporting transgender people, but “social consciousness of trans identities has grown.” But Mr. Dunn, who is executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, also adds that “while legal equality has been moving in right direction, lived equality is still a major challenge we face.”

For example:

• Nearly one-third of transgender people live in poverty, compared with 14 percent of the US population.
• The unemployment rate in the transgender community is 15 percent, three times higher than the national average, according to a 2015 survey of 27,715 transgender people in American states, territories, and military bases.
• Two of every five respondents in the survey said they had experienced serious psychological distress in the month prior to completing the survey.
• Forty percent said they had attempted suicide —almost nine times the rate of the general US population.

The most alarming disparity in the transgender community, many say, concerns mental health. However, transgender people also face discrimination accessing housing, health care and other social services, research has found.

And these social issues, like so many others, have roots in schools. Of the survey respondents who were out or perceived as transgender while in school, 54 percent said they were verbally harassed, 24 percent said they were physically attacked, and 13 percent said they were sexually assaulted because they were transgender. Seventeen percent said they left school as a result of their mistreatment.

Something that seems minor, like barring a transgender student like Gavin Grimm from using the boy’s bathroom, can have cascading negative effects throughout society and throughout life, says Jessie Adams, a transgender male who is a mental health counselor in a Boston-area hospital.

Among transgender university and college students who were denied access to gender-appropriate bathrooms or campus housing, 60 percent attempted suicide, according to a 2016 study by researchers at Georgia State University.

“There actually is a statistically significant relationship between access to bathrooms and appropriate housing and suicide attempts,” says Jody Herman of the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on sexual orientation and gender identity law at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. “When you have these experiences of disparate treatment or discrimination, it does impact you.”

'What's wrong with ... a space just for women?'

But there are other Americans equally concerned that if their criticisms and concerns are not heard, then other populations will be put at risk.

Indeed, a diverse coalition of voices oppose, to varying degrees, the expansion of transgender rights, with bathroom access perhaps the hottest topic of all.

Miriam Ben-Shalom is a lesbian Army veteran and a renowned gay rights activist who campaigned against the military’s policy excluding homosexuals and, later, its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But she is also concerned that allowing transgender women access to female-only spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms could put them in danger, views that caused her to be removed as grand marshal of the Milwaukee Pride Parade last year.

“I don’t think transgender people should be discriminated against. They ought to be able to have employment, they ought to have housing,” says Ms. Ben-Shalom, but “what’s wrong with having a space just for women? What’s wrong with having a room of our own?”

“Right now any male who self-identifies as a female can get into any locker room or women’s space,” she adds. “How do you know who’s a good guy and who isn’t a good guy?”

Similar concerns have surfaced in liberal areas as the transgender community has become more prominent. These range from a group of swim moms in New York’s Upper West Side who voiced concerns after their daughters reported seeing a “bearded individual” in the women’s changing room, to a leader of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who quit the organization over its support for transgender people seeking to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity.

Thus, some state gender nondiscrimination laws are facing legal challenges. The Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) and a coalition of other groups last year successfully proposed a ballot measure, to be voted on November 2018, to repeal the state’s law, enacted last year, banning discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of gender identity. On its website, the MFI says it is “dedicated to strengthening the family and affirming the Judeo-Christian values upon which it is based.”

And for Andrew Beckwith, the group’s president, the transgender bathroom issue has become “a zero-sum game.”

“Not everyone can have what they want in this case, so what is the most reasonable accommodation?” he asks. “There is no great solution, but the best, most common-sense solution that protects the most rights, that does the best good for the most people, is reasonable accommodations like they had [for] Gavin Grimm.”

That Grimm challenged the Gloucester County school board’s decision requiring him to use a gender neutral bathroom “shows an unwillingness to be reasonable on this issue,” he adds.

Of course, Grimm had been using the boys’ bathroom at his high school for two years without incident before some parents found out and complained, precipitating the school board’s decision. And it is facts like that that bother transgender advocates.

The coalition behind the Massachusetts repeal effort keeps a long list of “examples of privacy violations” on its website, including many from conservative media websites. But other groups – including the left-leaning Media Matters for America – point out that there haven't been any increases in sexual assault in any state that has passed a nondiscrimination law.

Transgender rights advocates also point out that every state in the union already has Peeping Tom and sexual assault laws. Law enforcement agencies in states that passed or are considering bathroom bills, including North Carolina and Texas, have said the laws would have little impact on public safety while potentially diverting resources away from more important police work.

At the end of the day, transgender people are the ones who are more at risk of assault in bathrooms, says Ms. Meyers.

“Whether he’s accepted or not, as the mother of a transgender student I’ll always be worried about Chris, every day of my life, whether the law changes or not,” she adds.

'I just want to feel like myself'

Chris says he felt like he was a boy “from a very, very young age,” long before he learned the term “transgender.” He last wore a dress when he was seven years old (for a Communion), and counts himself fortunate that he has a supportive family, particularly in the social minefield that is high school.

“You’re looking for friends and acceptance, and when you don’t find that you feel alone, you feel depressed, and you feel like there’s no one to turn to,” he says. “When you don’t get that [family] support, it can bring you to those dark times in your life.”

While some in the transgender community are fearful that their recent progress could be rolled back, Chris is hoping there will be more opportunities in the future to “show there’s no reason to be scared of transgender people.”

“Just imagine being trapped in a body and you can’t get out of it, and you don’t feel comfortable,” he adds. “I just want to feel like I’m normal and just like every other boy and man out there. I just want to feel like myself.”

Reuters

With Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at his side (L), President Donald Trump hosts a lunch with ambassadors of countries on the UN Security Council at the White House April 24.

One reason individuals support their police is so they don’t have to own a gun. Police are the preferred night watchmen of safety. Yet if some neighbors start to buy guns, the police look less reliable. And more people then buy guns. That same logic may be at play in Northeast Asia.

As North Korea moves to own more nuclear weapons and missiles, will Japan and South Korea seek nuclear weapons rather than rely on the United States – as the preferred cop on the beat – with its deterrence threat of nuclear retaliation?

For decades, many allies of the US have trusted its nuclear “umbrella” enough not to develop their own atomic arsenal. This has helped curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons, helping to keep the world safe from a devastating type of warfare. But the North Korea crisis could change this key aspect of the global order. If a major country like Japan, despite its deep and constitutional commitment to pacifism, ever feels the need to go nuclear, what will stop other countries from doing the same?

It is in this moral context that the world must watch what President Trump, along with China, is doing about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about “America first” and his mixed signals about honoring defense commitments to allies, he so far seems engaged in finding ways to restrain North Korea. He attended a White House briefing of all 100 US senators on North Korea in an unusual summit on Wednesday, April 26. And he met with United Nations Security Council members on Monday.

“Whether we want to talk about it or not, North Korea is a big-world problem, and it’s a problem we have to finally solve,” he said. That is not the rhetoric of someone who believes in retrenchment from America’s unique role in nuclear deterrence.

Among all Americans, Trump has the strongest backing from his core supporters in dealing with this issue. According to a 2016 survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 68 percent of those supporters see a “critical threat” in the possibility of unfriendly countries becoming nuclear powers. That percentage is higher than for Republicans in general and Democrats. And their strong support is in contrast to their lukewarm support – only 51 percent – for the US to take an active role in world affairs.

Trump’s real strategy toward North Korea remains uncertain. He has suggested negotiations, putting pressure on China, and beefing up missile defenses in the region. And his aides say a military strike on the North’s nuclear facilities is one option. “I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea,” he says. “You know why? Because they shouldn’t know.”

At the least, however, he is engaged, holding fast to a logic that nuclear proliferation is not a moral course for the world.